Bad Indians

According to Lisa Udel, “Miranda works to counter pre-vailing narratives about Native people still evident in contemporary American culture—such as the California school curriculum’s fourth-grade ‘mission project’”[6] Miranda demonstrates how “the Mission Unit” promotes imperialist and racist ideologies, rather than portray an accurate history of California Missions.[7] Miranda combats these overarching mythologies by “writing a tribalography that challenges the official story.”[8] According to Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, who developed the term, tribalography refers to a rhetorical style that Native people use as an “eloquent act of unification.”[9]

In one passage, Miranda recounts her visit to Mission Doloras. During her visit, she meets a mother and her daughter, who are there for the daughter’s Mission Project. In response to a remark about California Natives existence, Miranda reveals that she is a member of the Ohlone/Costanoa Esselen Nation.[7] Miranda focuses on the daughter, recounting that, “Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard.”[7] Regarding this story, Shanae A. Martinez notes that, “Miranda's living presence intervenes in the Mission Mythology, which denies the existence of any living Mission Indians and in effect denies their claims to land...she [] epitomizes the process by which settler-colonial metanarratives are institutionally authorized and internalized.”[8]

As several critics note, the memoir demonstrates the power of stories and storytelling as vehicles for Indigenous people’s histories and resistance.[4][5][7] In an interview about the memoir Miranda states, “Story is the great healer—of people, of histories, of imbalance.”[4] Lauren Furlan explains how storytelling as a form of historical retelling when she states that “Miranda makes her ancestor’s storytelling a valid mode of Indigenous history-keeping and history-telling, demonstrating that stories of Indigenous life are history in the same way that official records are history.”[10]

One specific story involves a young Indigenous woman named Vicenta Gutierrez, who was sexually assaulted by Padre Real. In her retelling, Isabel narrates the story tersely, stating that “‘the girl went running to her house, saying the Padre had grabbed her.’”[5] According to Shanae A. Martinez, this story counters the mythology of missions being absent of abuse and sexual assault and tells a story about resistance.[8] As Lisa J. Udel states, “Miranda reads Meadows’s use of Vicenta’s story as a form of community activism against ‘silence and lies.’”[6] It works and reworks the functions and expectations of storytelling, for as Furlan elaborates, “we are engaged in a very Indigenous practice: that of storytelling as education, as thought-experiment, as community action to right a wrong, as resistance to representation as victim.”[10]

Through a variety of media, Bad Indians embodies both a fragmented and non-linear structure.[6] As Udel notes, Miranda is able to create a narrative that is “constructed by what she finds, chooses, and takes possession of: Miranda’s intentional compilation that breaks with the traditional autobiographical form. And not just the “pieces” are connected, but so too are tribal history and Miranda’s story across time and space.”[6] The memoir spans decades, drawing connections between the violence inflicted upon Mission Indians and its effects on Miranda's interpersonal relationships.[11]

According to Furlan, Miranda employs a variety of different media and sources in her memoir to reconstruct and decolonize the historical narrative of indigenous people in California and her own indigenous background.[10] Bad Indians is composed of “part historical archive, part family history, part personal narrative, and part poetry.”[10]

There are a total of ten poems penned by Miranda within the memoir. The first two poems, “Los Pájaros” and “Fisher of Men,” are “based on writings by Junipero Serra.”[7] Furlan notes that Miranda took creative liberties with Serra’s writings to emphasize specific themes present throughout the memoir, like coercive sexual relations between colonizers and Indigenous women and the dehumanizing treatment of Indigenous people by colonizers.[10] As Furlan notes, the alterations to Serra’s accounts of Indigenous people provide colonial documents with an Indigenous perspective regarding Indigenous history.[10]

Articles and newspapers are referenced and depicted in various formats in the memoir. The poem “Old News” is written from an assortment of newspaper excerpts from the Sacramento Union, the Sacramento Daily, the Sacramento Daily Democratic State Journal, and the San Francisco Bulletin.[10] In two essays that discuss derogatory names against Indigenous people, Miranda incorporates an excerpt from Oscar Penn Fitzgerald’s travel book California Sketches and an image of a California State bond “for the ‘suppression of Indian hostilities.’”[10][7] Another newspaper clipping titled “‘Bad Indian Goes on Rampage at Santa Ynez’” depicts an Indigenous man named Juan Miranda who goes “on a rampage” after drinking some “fire water.”[10] According to Furlan, the subsequent poem, “Novena to Bad Indians,” serves as “guidance on how to read” the newspaper clipping through recognition that Indigenous “acts of rebellion” were meant to offset “settler colonial violence.”[10]

Much of Miranda’s memoir consists of essays regarding Indigenous history in California, her personal narratives about family and Indigeneity, and transcribed recordings from her grandfather’s cassette tapes.[1]

Miranda’s short story “Coyote Takes a Trip” appears in the fourth section of the memoir, “Teheyapami Achiska: Home 1961-present.” “Coyote” is a creator in Esselen mythology.[12][1]

There is one cartoon featured in Bad Indians titled “California Pow Wow,” by L. Frank.[1]

Miranda includes images of herself, her family, documents, Indigenous people, works of art by colonizers, and one of J.P. Harrington in her memoir.[1]